Jimmy's Buzz Guide Review:A stunning, serene, and occasionally spectacular documentary about the waters that cover more than 70 percent of the earth's surface highlighted by some astounding underwater photography.

Oceans

Co-directed by Jacques Perrin ("The Chorus") and Jacques Cluzaud ("Winged Migration") Oceans is an often stunning, serene, and occasionally spectacular documentary, but with little of the narrative
flow and only a fraction of the visual majesty found in Disney's Earth,the first nature film these talented filmmakers produced in 2009. It
also not nearly as enthralling as their breathtaking Winged Migration in 2003. Instead of focusing on particular animals and depicting their
individual plights, Oceans skips from
one organism to the next without giving us more than a couple of tidbits of information about each creature. It's not even as compelling as
BBC's Planet Earth or just about anything your likely to see on the Discovery
Channel.

The most memorable sequence features newborn sea turtles hatching on the beach and making their
perilous journeys back to the ocean as they are preyed upon by the birds
overhead. We learn in the narration by Pierce Brosnan that only one in a thousand make it. But you've probably seen and heard this information before, although it is still one of the
film's few truly involving moments. A similar scene in which sea lions are attacked by great white
sharks after a day of sunbathing is also quite effective, but it too clearly avoids being too graphic, lest children might become become traumatized. In fact, the whole movie seems to have been sanitized for
younger viewers at the expense of a truer, tougher depiction of the
natural order of things.

The fascination of the exotic and
the technical brilliance of the images is not quite enough this time. At best it serves as a teaser to what you're going to find beneath the surface of the ocean. Finally, in the final twenty minutes you get the environmental lecture on what pollution and global warming are causing, but it hardly seems relevant to what you've just seen. Nevertheless, Ocean is clearly worth seeing, if only for the
astounding underwater images it presents.